Pet cloning: Best friends reunited

For the super-rich who can’t face losing a beloved dog, there is a
genetically engineered solution. But at what ethical cost? Tom de Castella
went to California to meet the world’s first commercially cloned puppies.

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Missy, a border collie/husky cross that died in 2002Photo: Aya Brackett

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Mira, one of three puppies successfully cloned from the DNA of MissyPhoto: Aya Brackett

There is a scene in The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh’s novella of 1948, that takes place at a fictional pet cemetery called the Happier Hunting Ground in Los Angeles. 'In the presence of a dozen mourners,’ Waugh wrote, 'the coffin of an Alsatian was lowered into the flower-lined tomb. The Reverend Errol Bartholomew read the service. “Dog that is born of bitch hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”’

The book is a merciless send-up of the sentimentality of American pet owners and their inability to cope with death. A sign that Waugh was not greatly exaggerating came in 2007 when a billionaire hotelier from Connecticut, Leona Helmsley, died and left a $12 million trust fund to her white Maltese dog, Trouble. (A judge subsequently reduced it to $2 million.)

Americans invest a lot in their pets, emotionally and financially. There are 75 million dogs in the US, with 39 per cent of households owning at least one dog, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association (in Britain, the figure is about 21 per cent). Last year, Americans spent $41.2 billion on their animals, and the market has almost doubled since 1998. To find the country’s most passionate pet owners you have to go, like Waugh, to California.

As I stepped off the ferry at Sausalito, San Francisco Bay shimmered in the midday sun. Ahead of me, in the green, prosperous hills of the Bay Area, stood Mill Valley, a wealthy, picturesque town where the offices of BioArts International (which describes itself as 'a biotech startup focusing on unique, untapped markets in the multi­billion-dollar livestock, companion animal and human genomics industries’) are located. I had come to see a man about a dog.

Missy was a mongrel who was rescued from a dog pound. She was thought to be three quarters border collie, one quarter husky, and was adored by her wealthy California owner. So beloved was she that, in 1998, aged 11, under the supervision of executives from what would later become BioArts, she was flown to Texas Agricultural & Military (A&M) University in the town of College Station to have her DNA preserved for ever. She had been spayed so was unable to have puppies. In any case, her owner did not want Missy’s offspring; she wanted an exact replica. It was the beginning of the Missyplicity Project, the first serious attempt to clone a pet dog. BioArts had initially invited several institutions to bid for the opportunity to clone Missy, and chose A&M because of its ground­breaking embryo research programme.

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Missy became a canine cause celebre, the subject of numerous press articles and a 2001 book – Your Pedigree Chum – by the British journalist James Langton. In those days, no one knew the identity of Missy’s owner, and the public face of the project was BioArts’s chairman, Lou Hawthorne. Now 48, Hawthorne was born in Connecticut, the son of a professor of medieval art, and moved to California when he was five. He grew up with animals – cats, dogs, chickens, guinea pigs, a turkey called Henrietta. Initially he worked as a cinematographer in the Bay Area, and once directed a documentary about Zen Buddhism, but, he says, 'I’ve always had an amateur interest in science, going back to the word’s root, which is “love”.’

After news of the project spread, pet owners all over the world bombarded Hawthorne with pleas to clone their beloved animals. Demand was so great that he set up another company, Genetic Savings & Clone, allowing owners to bank their pets’ DNA (for a price).

Hawthorne had been inspired by the story of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be successfully cloned from an adult cell. She was made, if that is the word, by scientists at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh in 1996 from a cell from a ewe’s udder – she is named after Dolly Parton – which was then transferred to an unfertilised egg cell (from a different sheep) that had had its nucleus removed. The hybrid cell was then given a jolt of electricity to spark it into action, before being implanted in a surrogate mother. The process, somatic cell nuclear transfer, was hardly dependable – Dolly was the only lamb that survived to adulthood from 277 attempts – but it remains the only proved method of animal cloning.

After Dolly came Polly, a genetically modified lamb engineered to produce a human protein in her milk that could be given, in theory, to haemophiliacs and bone disease sufferers. In recent years, monkeys, cats and cattle have all been successfully cloned, and food is being produced across the world from animals descended from clones.

But dogs, it seemed, were different. Sheep and cattle naturally breed a lot, unlike dogs, which produce relatively few eggs. As Dr Mark Westhusin of the Veterinary Physiology and Pharmacology Department at A&M University, the chief scientist on the Missyplicity project in its early days, told Langton seven years ago, 'The problem with dogs is as much logistical as technological. In fact, cloning is not as scientifically difficult as people try to make out. But what you do need is a lot of eggs.’

Despite the initial optimism (Westhusin boasted that pet cloning would be widespread within a few years, costing about £10,000 per pet: 'No more than a nice piece of jewellery or a car’), cloning Missy proved much more difficult than imagined.

Hawthorne and A&M diversified their research to other animals. In 2001 the first cloned cat – named CopyCat – was born. Hawthorne had provided the university with DNA from a pedigree Himalayan, a 'beautiful cat’, but scientists at A&M used the DNA of a different donor – an unremarkable tortoiseshell – without informing him. The donor was orange, black and white, but because of the way tortoiseshells pass on their genes, the clone was black and white. In other words, it didn’t resemble the donor animal. Hawthorne was devastated: 'It created an enduring myth that clones will not resemble their donor. It was a disaster, as our product is all about resemblance. A&M were quite proud of it but to me it was terrible news.’ Disillusioned with the scientists at A&M, Hawthorne ended the relationship.

Missy died in 2002, aged 15, and her story disappeared from the public consciousness. Then, at the end of 2007, news emerged that a Missy clone, Mira, had been born – in South Korea. Soon, there were two more puppies.

It turned out that Missy’s wealthy, anonymous owner had been Lou Hawthorne’s mother, Joan. 'The initial impetus to get into cloning was simply to serve my family, who wanted a clone of the family dog,’ Hawthorne told me. 'The deeper I got, the more fascinated I became.’ The project had been funded by Mrs Hawthorne’s close friend John Sperling, a billionaire educationalist who set up the University of Phoenix. 'He did not expect to get a return on his investment,’ Hawthorne said. The project has cost $20 million so far.

The cloning of Missy would not have become a reality without Hwang Woo-Suk, a controversial Korean biomedical scientist. In 2005, more than two years before the successful cloning of Missy, his researchers at Seoul National University claimed to have created the first cloned dog, an Afghan hound called Snuppy (Seoul National University Puppy). Hwang’s reputation grew, culminating in announcements in 2004 and 2005, backed up by papers in the respected journal Science, in which he claimed to have cloned a number of human embryonic stem cells: a crucial breakthrough that could lead to human cloning.

Hwang became a national hero in South Korea and was awarded the title of Supreme Scientist, the country’s highest scientific honour. But in late 2005, following claims by a whistleblower and an investigative television programme, it emerged that significant parts of his research had been fabricated. The following year, Hwang was indicted for fraud and embezzlement by South Korean prosecutors, who discovered he had helped himself to $3 million of research funds. He escaped prison, but was fired by the university and banned by the government from doing any more human-cloning research. He went to work at the Sooam Bio­engineering Research Institute in Yongin.

Despite Hwang’s downfall, and though some had initially doubted his dog-cloning claims, his work on Snuppy was still regarded to be genuine. Hawthorne, having split from the team at A&M, was casting around for new partners. He decided, controversially, that he would throw his lot in with Hwang. Hawthorne admits he was anxious. 'I did have some concerns about working with Dr Hwang because of the whole stem-cell crisis. But his dog work had been validated so we felt it was in our customers’ best interests to work with someone who was a master of cloning dogs, regardless of what else he had failed to do in his life.’ In 2007 Missy’s DNA was flown out to Hwang in Korea and cloned using the same method that produced Snuppy. Mira was born in December 2007, the other two puppies in February 2008.

BioArts’s PR man, Ed Fogelman, collected me from the Sausalito ferry. After a short drive, he parked at a small motel-like building in Mill Valley. We were about to go up to the first-floor offices (no lab work takes place here) when Farah Shaw, one of BioArts’s six employees, called out. Shaw was walking a black-and-white puppy, 10 months old. 'Say hello to Mira,’ she said. I’m not sure what I had been expecting, but Mira looked just like a normal dog. There was nothing out of the ordinary about her. Of course, that is the point.

We followed Mira upstairs to Hawthorne’s office where we were greeted by her sibling clones, Chingu and Sarang. The three identical pups did what comes naturally and made a nuisance of themselves, forcing everyone to reach for their coffee cups and move their legs as they scampered about. On one wall of the office was a huge photograph of Missy, a picture of Lassie-like serenity. The physical resemblance between the generations was clear – those keen playful faces, the splashes of black-and-white fur – although the husky seemed to be more pronounced in the clones than in Missy.

Hawthorne was dressed in jeans and a black polo shirt, socks and no shoes. The tan, coiffured Clooney-grey locks and close-cropped beard completed the California-casual look. Hawthorne introduced the three Missy clones to the world via a video, posted on YouTube last summer. Tests conducted by the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory at the University of California concluded that the three dogs were indeed clones. (There had been two further puppies, but these died soon after birth.) Mira now lives with Hawthorne, the others with friends.

I asked Hawthorne why, in his opinion, it took so long to get from Missy’s DNA to a clone, but he didn’t want to dwell on past failures, and has already moved on to the next phase of the Missyplicity project. He unveiled his plans in the YouTube clip: 'We’re delighted to be able to offer dog cloning to the general public through our Best Friends Again programme.’

Best Friends Again was conceived as a potentially lucrative dog-cloning 'auction’, organised in the manner of an eBay sale, open to all. Bids were invited over a five-day period with the five top bidders getting to clone their pet. Hawthorne explained that the bidding war raised about $750,000 and he is sure that his customers won’t be disappointed. 'If the client doesn’t feel [the clone’s resemblance to the parent dog] is extremely high, comparable to identical twins,’ he told the New York Times recently, 'they can ask for their money back.’

While the five highest bidders in the BioArts auction remain anonymous, Hawthorne told me proudly that he had reserved a spot for a sixth dog, whose owner would not have to pay a cent. James Symington is a former Canadian policeman turned actor who lives in Los Angeles, where he plays cops in television soaps and films, while helping out in dog-rescue projects in his spare time. It was Trackr, his Alsatian, that I wanted to talk to him about. Symington and Trackr had recently retired from a police search-and-rescue team in Halifax, Nova Scotia, when news of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks broke. Knowing Trackr’s unique qualities, and that there was a shortage of search-and-rescue dogs in New York, Symington drove for 14 hours, and arrived early on September 12.

'We found lots of body parts and human debris,’ Symington said. 'It wasn’t till early morning that Trackr gave me the sign. If he finds a live person, his body becomes erect, his tail shoots straight up in the air.’ Trackr was responsible for finding the last survivor from the rubble, Genelle Guzman, a 30-year-old employee of the Port Authority who worked on the 64th floor of the North Tower.

Last summer, when Symington, 42, saw Hawthorne on television talking about a competition to clone the most extraordinary, deserving dog, he knew that he should enter Trackr, now 15. Symington sent off his application to BioArts and describes the win as the most exciting day of his life. 'What you’ve got to understand is that Trackr is my best friend and lifelong companion,’ Symington told me. 'He’s changed my life in ways I can’t explain. To know that his legacy was going to go on is the greatest gift I’ve ever received. If Trackr’s double has even 70 per cent of him, then I’ll put him to work for the search-and-rescue team – and I’ll be dusting off my gloves, too.’

Yet many in the scientific community think that pet cloning comes with unrealistic expectations. 'Anyone thinking they’re going to get Fluffy back is gravely mistaken,’ says Robert Lanza, the chief scientific officer at the stem cell research company Advanced Cell Technology. In other words, he says, identical genes do not result in animals that behave in the same way because environmental factors are extremely important.

Dr Robert Blelloch, an assistant professor at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has similar doubts: 'What people are getting is not an exact copy.’ While the DNA make-up may be similar or even identical, how the DNA is presented is almost certainly going to be different. This is because the process of converting an adult cell to an embryonic cell by cloning is rarely, if ever, complete and can be fraught with errors. The result, he says, is often a less fit or disease-prone animal. 'I think pet cloning is a mistake,’ Blelloch says. 'I appreciate people’s love for dogs, but cloning will produce a less than perfect replicate with a high risk for substantial health complications.’

For Blelloch and many other scientists, the proper application of cloning is not reproductive but therapeutic – stem cell research in which embryos are cloned to harvest cells that can be used to treat and research diseases in humans.

Of greater concern to Hawthorne is the competition BioArts faces from a rival dog-cloning organisation. Hwang’s former protege Lee Byeong-Chun, who was also suspended from Seoul National University over the stem-cell fraud, along with many of the Snuppy scientists, now works for the Korean company RNL Bio. Last August RNL unveiled what it described as the world’s first commercially cloned pet. Once again, a Californian was involved, this time a former beauty queen, Bernann McKinney, who had paid RNL $50,000 to clone her pitbull, Booger, who died two years ago. McKinney had sold her house to meet the cost. 'I had to make sacrifices and I dream of the day when everyone can afford to clone their pet, because losing a pet is a terrible, terrible loss to anyone,’ she said. RNL announced that it was open to offers from pet owners worldwide, and boasted that it could clone up to 300 dogs in 2009.

Hawthorne, however, believes that RNL is breaking the law. The patents for commercial exploitation of the cloning technology developed in Roslin are held by Start Licensing in Arizona, and Hawthorne insists that BioArts has an exclusive deal with them. Last October, Start took legal action against RNL in the South Korean courts – the case is still progressing.

So once again, and despite the fact that arguably the most difficult part – producing a viable clone of Missy – has been achieved, the pet cloning business has stalled. Seven years ago, Hawthorne was bullish, telling James Langton, 'We will probably have as many orders as we can handle. Never underestimate the love some people have for their pets.’ Today, even without the rivalry with RNL, he admits that the business case for dog cloning is not what it had seemed. 'I don’t think the dog [cloning] market is that big. After what has happened to the economy, people still want to send their kids to the best schools, but it’s a terrible time to be cloning dogs or cats.’

It seems surprising, and perhaps a little sad, that after 11 years of groundbreaking work Hawthorne appears to be turning away from animal cloning – he told me that BioArts is now building laboratories in China and looking to diversify into human embryonic stem cell research, as well as disease-testing techniques for viruses such as avian flu.

For him the incredible journey is over; he has achieved what he set out to do. 'I’ve cloned my family dog, we’re cloning a few dogs for the public and one amazing dog as a public service,’ he said. 'This has been a very interesting challenge, I’ve learnt a tremendous amount doing it.’

The wider world is not, it seems, ready for pet cloning on a grand scale, and Lou Hawthorne is not going to try to persuade it otherwise. Life is too short.